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A Shift in Lifecycle

A Shift in Lifecycle Marketing Lifecycle marketing occurs when marketers communicate with specific audience members at precise times. Marketers told us that lifecycle marketing is still a key piece of their overall strategy. We define lifecycle marketing as the tactics that reach customers across four core stages: Acquire Onboard Engage Retain Acquiring new audience members and converting potential customers into subscribers (whether to email, social, or mobile communications). Onboarding subscribers and making them accustomed to the cadence and content of your interactions. Engaging subscribers with automated, personalized campaigns. Retaining existing subscribers with targeted reengagement and win-back strategies. And while marketers are still focused on lifecycle marketing, we’ve uncovered a notable shift. Unlike earlier findings (including IBM’s The State of Marketing 2013) that showed acquiring new subscribers as marketers’ greatest lifecycle challenge, our research found that driving engagement and revenue (65%) has edged to the forefront of their lifecycle concerns. The top three lifecycle marketing campaigns that marketers currently use are newsletter (66%), promotional (61%), and web opt-in (54%). The next highest utilized campaign, transaction (42%), is 12% lower than web opt-in usage. A significant gap exists between the importance marketers place on lifecycle marketing campaigns and the number of campaigns they actually implement, as shown by the gap between the top three campaigns and the many other underutilized campaigns. For example, birthday campaigns are used by only 19% of marketers and loyalty campaigns are used by only 36%, however, these two campaigns have the highest reported success rates compared to other lifecycle marketing campaigns. Along with testing other lifecycle strategies, implementing a birthday or loyalty campaign may be a great way to differentiate your brand, build loyalty, increase engagement, and drive results—all with minimal effort. 10 2014 State of Marketing exacttarget.com